The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

Use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.